WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — We are shaped by an infinity of reflections, like a rainbow. This immersive installation – literally – reflects our differences and multiple identities. Inspired by The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, Fakoor reflects on the myth of a clear-cut national identity and the celebration of difference.

WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — Do people treat plants with enough respect? What happens when plants break out of the background of our living rooms? Gosie Vervloessem calls on a number of horror movies in which plants frighten us. Sometimes they attack us head-on, but often the horror lies in ominously waving branches and rustling bushes. According to the artist the exploitative human-vegetal relation comes to a climax in the nature reserve, the plantation and the botanical garden. Places with a direct link to a colonial past.

WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — Within a series of small compositions, bodies are placed and displaced in relation to each other. Playing with weight and balance, they counterbalance and shape the space between them. In the margin of the performance, Wouter Krokaert also shows the visual work that underlies it. What is explored in one area is reinforced and supplemented in another, across the boundaries of disciplines.

This special repertory evening will present three early works by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, each of which is based on a piece of classical music. The programme features a combative choreography set to the layered rhythms and harmonies of Bartók’s Quartet n°4, a group piece that defies gravity and depicts the ingenious counterpoint in Beethoven’s Die Grosse Fuge, and a shamelessly romantic duet set to Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Ictus and the Brussels Philharmonic will accompany the pieces live especially for the Brussels series.

The legendary opera Einstein on the Beach by Phillip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs premièred at the Festival of Avignon in 1976. For this new concertante version, the Ictus ensemble is joining forces with the Collegium Vocale Ghent and with neo-folk legend Suzanne Vega. The musical composition and the musicality of the libretto are the central focus in a minimalist and hypnotizing soundscape that lasts 200 minutes.

Eleanor Bauer loves playing with the codes and concepts of contemporary dance. In New Joy, she confronts the post-truth age: this dataistic cyber-musical knocks straight through the boundaries of various registers. From body language and spoken language to computer language and back again, from emotional to artificial intelligence, from movement to sound. Along with composer Chris Peck, Bauer engages all of your senses in her search for meaning and hidden implications.

This season, Decoratelier Jozef Woutersis collaborating with Open Kunstenhuis Globe Aroma to create Underneath Which Rivers Flow. A group of women and men – builders, poets, and dreamers – meet every week at Decoratelier in Molenbeek. In this space, they build stories together, a secret garden full of wormholes to unsuspected worlds.

In her new creation, Mette Edvardsen explores interfaces with opera, flanked by composer and performer Matteo Fargion. Together, they deconstruct the mythological figure of Penelope, the woman who spent years waiting for her husband Odysseus. But her apparent passivity conceals tremendous power. Be whisked away to this intimate, minimalist dream world, where new relationships are forged between women, the world, and the other.

BL!NDMAN is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary and since 1991 it has been a regular guest at Kaaitheater. To celebrate, we are organizing a festive programme! MINIMAL-MAXIMAL – part 1 of the evening – is returning to their minimalistic roots, in the line of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Afterwards, the complete collective ([sax], [drums] and [strings]) along with a DECAP organ will play Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks by G.F. Handel.

This performance moves to the 2019-2020 season due to productional reasons.

We would like to invite you to our New Work, which does not yet exist. It is still lurking somewhere in an invisible, intimate place, yet to be made, and is still carefully looking for words to present itself to you.

Claire Croizé engages with two of her favourite sources of inspiration: Bach and Rilke. She places both masters in the hands of Matteo Fargion, the British composer and multi-instrumentalist. They have not created slavish interpretations of Bach and Rilke, but rather opted for a playful, somewhat unruly tribute.

Now that bodies are occupying more and more museums, choreographer and philosopher Noé Soulier is presenting an opposite movement: what if instead of bodies, the artworks themselves adapted to a new space? Performing Art presents twenty pieces from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. You do not see them as you walk through a museum, but from your seat in the theatre.

Ivo Dimchev is one name that cannot be missed from the Performatik programme: the exuberant performer has never missed a single edition. He often depends on audience participation to create his performances, such as P-Project (shown during Performatik13) and FB Theater. This time he is returning with his brand-new selfie concert. Take out your phone… because no selfies means no concert!

Alexis Blake selected a series of female poses found in artworks from the Renaissance to early Modernism and created a choreography and performance that explores subjectivity and examines gender and representation through embodiment, repetition and sound. Two dancers and four musicians in the Horta Hall at BOZAR will abstract the poses, strip them of their history and context, and confront the viewer to address, contradict and question preconceived notions of a body.

If we continue to consume more language more quickly and superficially, will we still be able to use language instinctively and emotionally? PRICE is appealing to movement and music to answer this question. Along with producer Cecile Believ, pianist Sebastian Hirsig, fashion label BARRAGÁN and photographer Mirjam Graf, he will captivate you with his body and voice. You stand next to him on stage, while the soundtrack of heavenly ambient will flow to dark tribal – and back again.

Nora Turato points a selfie-cam at today’s hectic internet culture. She exposes the fears that are at the root of our society’s shortening attention span. Her monumental installation in cold, black steel suggests that our ‘totally wired’ state of mind may be far more institutionalized than we think.

Dancer/choreographer Ula Sickle presents a new and intimate sound performance in the striking, seven-storey staircase of WIELS. It is a pared down score for body and voice, performed by the artist and singer Fabienne Seveillac.

How can dance, choreography, performance, and architecture create a new kind of space together? During Performatik19, choreographer and Kaaitheater artist-in-residence Radouan Mriziga will install a residency project at KANAL – Centre Pompidou. He is inviting dance and architecture students to share their knowledge and practice.

Drummer Will Guthrie and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen are performing together for the first time. You encircle the stage, on which a drum kit, a moving light installation and the bodies of the performers confront each other.

Fourfold (Autonomous Scenography) is a generator of scenographies, a machine that constantly produces different images. Image, sound, language and light do not aim to represent something, but to generate a reality in complete freedom.

Léa Drouet finds a spot in Kanal that she transforms into an area for play and experimentation for her six performers. Like a social laboratory, the piece tests the process involved in composing and disbanding groups. Infinite (re)arrangements of bodies and stage elements define new social rules like alternatives to the sole principles of inclusion and exclusion.

‘Death deserves our attention, not our fear. In this work, I hope to create a space in which we as a group can explore situations in which people die together.’ You take part in a physically performed thought experiment: with respect for the often true stories on which the scenes are based, human connections are unraveled and revealed.